A virtual clean room to teach USP 797 regulations for intravenous medications.

Objective: To provide a virtual environment for pharmacy students to learn United States Pharmacopeia Chapter 797 (USP 797) requirements, while recognizing the role of pharmacists in the safe use of intravenous (IV) medications.

Design: A virtual laboratory was created that included stations for IV medications, product verification, medication safety, and patient cases pertaining to high-alert medications. Pharmacy students used 3-D glasses and a wireless controller to navigate through the session and identify violations of USP 797 regulations.

Cyclic tetrapeptides via the ring contraction strategy: chemical techniques useful for their identification.

Cyclic tetrapeptides are a class of natural products that have been shown to have broad ranging biological activities and good pharmacokinetic properties. In order to synthesise these highly strained compounds a ring contraction strategy had previously been reported. This strategy was further optimised and a suite of techniques, including the Edman degradation and mass spectrometry/mass spectrometry, were developed to enable characterisation of cyclic tetrapeptide isomers.